THE POISON GARDEN website

Pontifications on Poison

Being some ramblings on events associated with poisonous plants.

Wednesday 7th March 2012

I mentioned, yesterday, that BBC1’s
‘Countryfile’ programme (link good until 11th march) cited a
piece of folklore specific to the
Taxus baccata, yew, growing in the churchyard of St Mary’s
Church, Painswick in Gloucestershire. The story says that there
are 99 yew trees in the churchyard because if ever a hundredth
is planted the devil pulls it out.

I’ll return to the topic of area specific folklore in a
moment but I wanted to comment on two things that the presenter,
Matt Baker, said about the yew trees in St Mary’s churchyard.

Introducing the folklore about the devil and the hundredth
tree he said ‘Legend has it St Mary’s has 99 of them [yew
trees]’. I wouldn’t have thought that legend has anything to do
with it. Either St Mary’s has 99 yew trees or it doesn’t. I know
the BBC is frequently accused of dumbing down but, surely, it
still has at least one person on the staff who can count to 99.

I’m inclined to think that, if there were 99 yew trees he
would have said so and that ‘Legend has it’ means there aren’t
99 yew trees but saying so takes the edge off the story. It is
often the case with folklore and suspicious beliefs of all sorts
that they don’t stand up to even the simplest examination of the
facts.

The second thing I want to take issue with is that he said
yew is planted in churchyards to keep livestock out. That’s a
piece of folklore that is widely repeated but, again, it doesn’t
stand up when you look at the facts. Though yew is deadly
poisonous to cattle and sheep deer seem to be unaffected by it.
There is some contention about that with some reports of wild
animals being poisoned by yew but others suggesting that deer
favour yew foliage and will seek it out. There was an article a
few years ago in a garden magazine published in New England that
suggested gardeners avoid planting yew because deer will be
attracted to it and cause damage.

Though there may be some equivocation about the appeal of yew
to deer there is another point that, for me, dispels the notion
of using yew as a deterrent. Yew is extremely slow growing and,
therefore, you would need some other method of keeping livestock
out of the churchyard while you waited a generation or two for
the yew to get big enough to take on that role.

My belief is that yew had pagan associations with preventing
the dead from walking and, as happened with many pagan beliefs,
Christianity adopted this as a way of bringing pagans to it. It
is said that yew roots form a shallow net that the dead cannot
penetrate or that the fine roots grow through the eyes of the
dead so they cannot see their way back to the land of the
living.

One of the best examples of the way folklore changes from
place to place concerns the
Ilex aquifolium, holly. In Ireland, this plant is said to
provide a home for fairies and, thus, should be grown in a quiet
part of the garden so that the fairies are undisturbed. In
England, witches are deterred by the sight of a holly and, so,
it should be planted close to the door.

Sometimes, the folklore stays the same but the plant changes.
So, in Scotland, the tree that deters witches and must be
present in the garden is Sorbus aucuparia, the rowan tree.